Global to local energy resource policy planning

Challenges in Adopting Sustainable Energy Pathways

Governments (at national, state, regional and local levels) and corporations face challenges when planning, investing, and monitoring their progress towards a more sustainable energy future.

1. Energy information is often unavailable, difficult to access, and expensive to measure
2. Methods for reporting data differ by organization, government and location, making meaningful comparison difficult, whether at a local or global level
3. Energy planning and decision support tools are often complex, do not scale and tend to focus on a single energy topic, making it difficult to achieve integrated ‘systems thinking’ across all energy sectors

Because of these challenges, organizations will often have no choice but to hire expensive energy-planning professionals to help develop their energy resource plans. Or worse, organizations will simply defer such planning altogether.

Free Energy Database (FRED) Overview

In partnership with The Climate Group and Otherlab, we have built a proof-of-concept of an energy planning tool called the Free Energy Database (FRED). FRED will be an online, cloud-based system that helps governments and corporations set goals and monitor their progress towards a more sustainable energy future, while making energy information more accessible, transparent and consistent across organizations.

FRED is not meant to replace detailed energy studies. Rather, it helps guide where those studies should be focused, to maximize the effectiveness of analytic effort, resources and spending.

FRED has six core components:

1. Collection and display of energy information from recognized scientific reporting bodies (EIA, IEA, etc.)
2. Functionality to allow government/corporate users to upload and store their energy data in native format
3. Data translator to convert (normalize) users’ data into a common, consistent format
4. Visualization (spatial, flow, statistical) to display users’ energy data in intuitive, integrated manner
5. Planning tools that allow users to forecast future energy states, create scenarios, and test outcomes
6. Exchange for users to access and compare energy data between organizations and locations

These components make FRED a powerful tool to assist with setting long-term energy goals, for tracking progress towards them, and for exchanging lessons-learned with peer organizations.

To expand the proof-of-concept, we are looking for partners for phase 2 of the project. Phase 2 would deliver an open-source system, free for anyone (governments, corporations, scientific-community) to download, use, and improve the software and underlying database.

Perspectives from our Partners

Dr. Saul Griffith, founder of Otherlab:
“Climate change has been called a ‘wicked hard’ problem. Finding solutions that simultaneously address technical limitations, social challenges, economics, and political realities is a daunting task. The power of [existing] tools to affect change has been inherently limited by their lack of at least one of three key features: 1) Energy and climate models do not scale from local up to a national or global level, making it very difficult to translate national goals into meaningful local actions. 2) Energy models are not contiguous across long planning horizons, making it very difficult to link historical performance to future goals. And 3) to maximize applicability, energy system models should be open-source, make their data publicly available, and accept user-generated data with no restrictions on data resolution. The FRED project tackles all these limitations to create an effective new approach to energy and climate planning.”

Mark Kenber, President of The Climate Group:
“Organizations such as The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency and almost all leading scientists agree that in order to tackle climate change, we must take ambitious action today to transform our energy system – a Clean Revolution in the way we produce and consume energy. This is a huge challenge but also a huge opportunity for leaders from business and government to create a low carbon economy that generates lasting jobs, provides energy security and drives sustainable long-term growth. We know as a society where we need to go. What is more difficult is to choose the most effective options at any given moment and to know whether we are leading or lagging in the race to a low carbon, prosperous future. FRED helps governments plan and track progress to the ‘clean revolution’ by harnessing critical energy information and use this to compare the impacts of different strategies and policies. As such it will be an invaluable tool in catalyzing the actions we so clearly need.”